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Feature of the Month - July 2009

The 1654 edition of Nicolas Culpeper’s Pharmacopoeia Londinensis The postcard sent by Freud from his home in Vienna acknowledging his election as an Honorary Fellow of the Society. Image will open in a new window Enlarge image

In 1935 Sigmund Freud was awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Society of Medicine. Three years later Freud took up residence in London where he died in 1939, having undergone treatment for cancer administered by Neville Finzi, a leading radiologist and founder of the RSM Section of Radiology.

A memorial meeting was organised by the RSM Section of Psychiatry following Freud's death. The tributes were led by Ernest Jones, later to become Freud's biographer. Professor Edward Mapother, a former President of the Section, described how Freud had "brought to psychology and psychiatry more of the imagination of the great artist than of the solid objectivity and rigid logic of the scientist."

In 1978, Freud's daughter, the psychoanalyst Anna Freud, was similarly awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Society.


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